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What to call the particle formerly known as Higgs

By Valerie Jamieson

A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but does it matter what a subatomic particle is called?

Earlier this month, organisers of a physics meeting requested that the Higgs boson – the still-hypothetical particle thought to endow other particles with mass – instead be referred to as either the BEH or scalar boson. The name change might seem esoteric, but it hints at a complex past – and trouble ahead over credit for the boson, if it is found.

To understand, rewind about 50 years. As with most scientific advances, a single mind did not solve the mass puzzle. Work by Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago in 1961 led to the idea that a mass-giving field interrupted an early universe until then filled only with massless particles.

In August 1964, Robert Brout and François Englert (the B and E in BEH) at the Free University in Brussels, Belgium, ironed out some kinks in the theory and detailed a mechanism. But it was Peter Higgs at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who first explicitly predicted the particle we now call the Higgs – in a paper published in October 1964.

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This progression explains the BEH boson option, one of the two mooted at the annual Moriond meeting in La Thuile, Italy, but why change it this year? Many say it is because Englert was at Moriond, and the organisers didn’t want to upset him. Other attendees, however, were upset by the proposed change, including Wade Fisher of Michigan State University in East Lansing.

Anonymous scalar

Fisher says the debaters fall into four main camps&colon; Higgs supporters; BEH proponents; those favouring the anonymous scalar boson; and those who favour another name – the BEHHGK boson. The latter group, including Fisher, want to credit Dick Hagen, Gerald Guralnik and Tom Kibble, who published a mass-giving mechanism in 1964.

Some believe that these physicists do not deserve to be considered on an equal footing with Brout, Englert and Higgs because their paper appeared later. Others disagree, because the paper was received by the journal Physical Review Letters before Higgs’s paper was actually published. Guralnik has even written a paper recalling how he heard of Brout, Englert and Higgs’s papers just as he and his colleagues were about to place their manuscript in the envelope. “Not a single thought or calculation was removed or added,” writes Guralnik. The only change they made was to the references, something that he now bitterly regrets.

The omission of these three names from the BEH name chosen at Moriond “was considered a curiosity, a slight, a political statement and a mistake by those to whom I spoke”, says Fisher.

Higgs momentum

Others point to the ad-hoc way in which particles seem to be named. “It’s not like elements whose names are very carefully chosen by a committee,” says physics Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg at the University of Texas at Austin, who named the Z boson that carries the weak force.

This might be a taste of the debate awaiting a Nobel prize committee soon. Many are calling 2012 “the year of the Higgs” – but a Nobel prize can be split between no more than three people (Brout is out of the running as he died last year).

In the meantime, will BEH catch on? Fisher doubts it. “There is too much momentum behind the name ‘Higgs’,” he says. “The Nobel committee may decide otherwise but they are not the sole arbiters of historical accuracy.”